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12 of the Best Free Digital Marketing Tools of 2017

There are thousands of digital marketing tools out there, and I know how long it can take to find the right one for you (and how expensive they can be). I’ve created a list of some of my favorite free marketing tools for 2017, many of which I use on a weekly basis to manage my team’s marketing efforts at Q.Digital.

Unfortunately, there are no one-size-fits-all marketing tools out there, so even though these tools work for me, they may not be optimized for you or your business marketing needs.

Many of these free tools also have paid versions, or extra features that you can pay for, however, you can use them successfully without paying a dime.

If you have a favorite free marketing tool, tweet to me at @TimWinfred and let me know!

No list of free marketing tools is complete without Buffer. Buffer is a fantastic free social media scheduling tool that has free and paid versions. The free version allows you to schedule up to 10 posts and connect one account from each social media platform (including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+). With Buffer, you can schedule to a pre-determined queue, or manually select the time to send the post.

Bonus: Check out the Buffer Blog for awesome social media tips and strategies.

Gleam is a free contest widget tool that makes it easy to run a contest through your website. The free version allows you to create a contest that can be embedded on your website or on Facebook, or they can host the contest for you. You can access the email address of the winners for free, but if you want to export the emails you collect with the tool, you’ll have to pay for the premium version.

Light Widget is a quick-and-easy widget that allows you to embed Instagram photos on a website. You can pull photos into the gallery by username or hashtag. Plus, the widget is responsive so it looks good on all screen sizes.

They have a free version of the widget that will update the photos every 24 hours, but there’s also a premium version that will update the photos once every 40 minutes. The best part is, the premium version only sets you back a one-time payment of $10. I’ve used this tool for years and love it!

Right Relevance is great for finding trending news topics to write about when you need a topic for a blog post. I even use it to find news to read about specific topics I’m interested in. There is also a really handy influencer discovery tool that makes it easy to find influential social media “celebrities” who talk about certain subjects. You get a limited number of results if you don’t want to create an account and log in, but if you create a free account you can access all of the features of the tool.

Social Search is a free monitoring and search engine tool to find content and see what people are saying about certain topics on social media. It’s simple and easy to use, and the free version allows you to search for keywords on multiple platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, Google+, VK, Reddit, YouTube and more. With the free version, you can also set up to two email alerts that will notify you of new mentions of certain keywords (like your brand name). If you’re going to be doing more than 100 searches a day, you will need to pay for the upgraded version of the tool, which is very reasonably priced.

TweetReach is a quick way to find out how a Twitter hashtag, username or keyword is performing. The free report, which you’ll need to sign in to view, analyses the last 100 tweets on that topic to provide you with reach and impressions, the top contributors, and the most popular tweets. If you want a larger report, you can pay a one-time fee of $20 to have the last 1,500 tweets analyzed.

If you’re looking to optimize your content with long-tail keyword, or maybe you are just looking for a topic for a blog post, Ubersuggest is a great way to find what you’re looking for. This tool takes your keyword and gives you hundreds of suggestions, starting with the most popular, for how to extend it to make it long-tail. It’s simple to use, and you can even download the keywords for free.

When you’re editing a video, stock video footage can help get your message across. Unfortunately, buying these videos can be expensive. That’s where Life Of Vids comes in! Created by Montreal’s LEEROY Agency, you can download more than 100 free videos and loops to use, with no copyright restrictions.

The Pixlr Editor is one of my go-to free marketing tools. I use it almost every day for quick photo edits when I don’t want to open up Photoshop. If you can’t afford Photoshop or the Adobe Creative Suite, it is also a great alternative. Although it doesn’t have all of the features that Photoshop does, this free tool provides you with a lot of basic photo editing necessities.

A good friend of mine introduced me to Canva years ago, and it is still one of my favorite tools for creating free marketing graphics. Whether you’re looking to create fun graphics for your blog, a social media post, an email, or anything in between, Canva has it all. And you don’t have to be a design expert to make things look good. While there are some premium features, the free features aare more than enough to create amazing designs. (I used Canva to create the photos in this post.)

If you are creating a proposal for a client, or you just want to see what your post would look like on a certain social networking site, AdParlor allows your to easily create free mock-ups of social media ads. From video and photo ads to simple text ads, you can create mock-ups for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest.

YouTube’s Audio Library has been around for years, but it’s amazing how many people still don’t know about it. Whenever I’m looking for free music for a project (video, podcast, etc.), I always check here first. If you are going to be uploading a video to YouTube and plan to monetize it, this is the best place to find music that you can be sure doesn’t violate anybody’s copyright.

What is your favorite free marketing tool? Tweet to me at @TimWinfred and let me know!